


Been Down So Long It Looks Like...

by tyroneslothrop



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Alcohol Mentions, Angst, M/M, Prose Poem, Smut, Suicide mentions, kind of?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 14:55:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5053108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tyroneslothrop/pseuds/tyroneslothrop
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I felt I was a spectator of my own life, surrounded by red felt and cup holders, the projection a soft whirring blur of ambiguity."</p><p>Dan tries his hand at dirty talk.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Been Down So Long It Looks Like...

Yawning from the depths of interrupted sleep, the moon dragged its body from their covers and strolled above the hemisphere. The sky was a flaky, swollen purple that threatened to peel off with every thrash of wind against it, tumbling, savage, like rolls of waves fighting against the sand. Sunlight dripped from the air and pattered softly on the ground, slowly forgotten. Once again waiting for the rising of day. Over this golden cascade, crows twirled in a seamless pirouette through the wading rivers of clouds, and as the dimming dawn turned day into night, Phil was balls deep.

The air sits like a cloak over their sweat-drenched bodies. Stars begin to permeate the room from their window, and it spills in long swishes down the length of Dan's body. Like a drunk artist in front of a canvas, careless, surrounded by watered down paint pots. A smattering of silver spots dribbles down Dan's chin, like the moon became kaleidoscopic just for him. Phil can only just see him through the darkness swamped over them, just the silhouette of a chest and a bouncing fringe. He places a hand on the top of his stomach, to feel him. His thrumming skin. Be sure. Melancholic butterflies beating at their window. The anguish of perspiration trickles over their corroding flesh, in the communion of their bedroom. Phil was getting fucked in his rib-cage, his heart now an orifice, his brain a caducous, temporary organ. He'd be happy to let it go, watch it lunge itself out the window, trailing gloopy pink guts in its wake. He doesn't know what he ever needed it for.

Short, sweet, inaudible gasps keep spilling from Dan's lungs and into Phil's throat, leaning over, noses bumping. The breaths between them seem to dance on their gyrating forms in a mocking conga line. He feels Dan's chest mingle into his body hair, and for a brief, spectacular moment, he cannot tell who is who. Two corpses slumped together, melting into each other's rotten carcass, indistinguishable. A careening burn strolls down Dan's thighs, forcing him to lean back again, raising his throat to the ceiling. Own hand sinking down to Phil's, collecting the folds of his flesh, running his index finger down the opposing one. Goes down further. Twirls his ring finger through his pubes. His cock bounces between them in a sweeping gesture.

"S'good?" Phil pants beneath him, and the corner of Dan's mouth twitches in silent admiration for his husband. Of course it's good, silly goose.

"Yeah, 'course it's good. You're good," he says, keeping up with his rhythmic, almost mechanical bounce. The thundering drum roll of oncoming rain compliments his words, the swooning strings behind the vocalist, the marigolds sat at his grave.

"I love you. You know that?"

He gazes up again, and Phil feels his heart sing in unwarranted adoration, his pale skin on his, the reverberating slap of flesh not so much sensual as it is comforting. He's home again. He thinks. He's been playing tricks on himself lately though. He nods.

"I'm going to spend my whole life with you, if you let me. I'll haunt you forever. Leave you in a constant state of catharsis. I'm incendiary. Touch me again. See?"

He lifts Phil's palm to his stomach, his dick still a swinging spectator beneath them. It's thin, frail and vulnerable, but it's there. It gets too realistic sometimes, Phil thinks, holding back tears. He wonders that if he let his tears unfurl, wash over their bodies in waves and crashes, would they drown? Would he finally be able to escape? He tries, squeezes his eyes, blinks rapidly. It doesn't come, the palpable, swinging arrival of nothingness running over his body. He sighs.

"Lighten up a bit, you've got a face on you like you're washing dishes. Such a diva, a showman through and through, aren't you? Remember when we toured? I loved that, the clashing cheers when we appeared on stage. I love dancing, performing. I've always loved attention, you know that. I could see you above the stage sometimes, floating in the spectral lights. Controlling my body like a string puppet, commanding me like it's your profession, some sort of sphinx swimming in the stage smoke. I'd been chugging vodka in the toilets most nights. I could feel it taking a gentle stroll down my blood stream. You were a Messiah bathed in the canary strobe lights. Everyone turned towards you like sunflowers to the sky. Bug-eyed in wonderment. We tangoed on the hotel balcony one night and I almost fell. There were stars in the sky seated like spectators, and we gave them a show. I remember the ghost of your breath dancing on my neck, tucking itself behind my ear. It resides there now. I talk to them sometimes. They don't respond.

"Whenever I've tried to describe our love, the words tend to hang around my form, ungraspable, glittering decor, opalescent and ethereal. All the possible adjectives coupling together, reproducing till my brain overflows with them, until I make a move to pick one out and they all turn to syrupy mush, cliches and cheesy metaphors. We're too exuberant, too alive for the written word. Literature is an old man's art form. Literature gets carved into dead trees. It becomes mass produced, the only sure-fire way to kill a creative soul. Literature gets sold to the elderly on the bleeding edge of death, looking for something to restore meaning, reingite their extinguished flames in their eyes. No, no, we're too young, too beautiful for that. We're not dead yet. Remember when you proposed? It was when you were driving one night, the susurrous ache of my heart pattering through the wind, with the moon some cracked crescented dusty charcoal, when you asked me, casual, distant, like you were curious about bus times and yes, I said yes, I told you yes as the dusk of night slowly turned into a dribble of rain and I pressed you up to the car door as you pulled into the first parking lot you seen and kissed the breath out of you, the splatters of water kicking us through the window. I was a vessel of your heart, yes; and 'yes' I said when you asked me to pop into the nearest shop and buy us both some crisps and 'yes' I said yes, my vocal chords swelling and weeping when I came back plastic packaging damp hair and all to a ring shimmering against the onyx air that drowned it, demonic and threatening but oh so beautiful similar to yourself and I placed it on my finger and you placed one on yours and we fucked in the backseat, my thighs burning, ignited, blood ripping through my flesh as you tore into my soul, the glove compartment still agape in our lifeless bedding.

"The next day you requested a woodland walk, so we could hold hands, share small talk, all that stuff. Sit on park benches and eat homemade sandwiches, throw the crusts to the solemn ducks. So there we were, and away I flew, blowing bubbles of wind in the murk of the stinking morning, your body thin on my path. Our spirits strung under the twinkling sun. In that moment, I sensed that we were no longer separate entities, rather a collective. A singular paper bag filled to the brim with our guts. I kissed you and fled again, always one step ahead.

"We travel down some more, the only people I see together in sunken apathy. The sun, the sky, the flowers, the trees. Swollen purple sentences. Bloated. Staggering all over the page. Like drunks ambling from the pub, to the store, to their home. We, ourselves, ambled to our flat again, collapsing on the untouched sheets. Sometimes sleep was not so much an occasional visitor as it was a burglar. It takes over me sometimes, making me faint. Sleep and death are separated by nothing thicker than a blade, and I hope if I die soon, I die in your arms... don't look like that."

The gushing sound of blood thumped in the room, on the sea of their passion. A colourful cohort of emotions rushing from their pores, fusing, intertwining, making someone new. The threads of their organs strung above them, weaved beyond their own accord, remembrance dripping onto the carpet. Nostalgia swimming laps over them. The amorous atmosphere becoming their death bed. The berry of Dan's love breaking on his tongue, flooding the riverbeds of Phil's muscle with its sweet goo. The longer Dan was perched above him, the longer Phil remained inside this phantom, the more he resembled some sentient sepulcher. In all his exuberant voluptuousness, secular in front of the still-rising moon. Rising, higher, higher, till morning would come again and it would end in the inevitable exile of Phil's soul. He acquiesced. Dan grins wickedly then sinks into himself. A calculated withdrawal.

"We awaken, a sunburst above your body, the clouds receding into the horizon. I lay drenched in the bed sheets. I was the antithesis of beauty. You kissed me anyway. I felt your murky breath mingle into mine, marinating in the sweet morning air. We were the perfect couple, birthed in the night time. When I see you, my heart does not skip. It arpeggiates. My body sways in the rise of a crescendo, only falling when I'm tucked in your arms. Your moles waltz on your biceps whenever you hold me, did anyone ever tell you that? A fan told me that.

"What is that poem you liked? "Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me?". As beautiful as it is, well written prose will disintegrate, rotten pieces of paper sinking through the desolate air, and with it so will we, fizzled out fireworks. I hope we will make the most of our short lived fame. Our adolescent audience looks on. Bow for them! We bow for them, then walk out the auditorium, irrelevant once again. We trawl through the night time streets, average strangers to the sunset. The shopkeepers set fire to themselves inside their glass cages. Imagine, we could have been one of them! Working our fingers to the bone in the name of casual capitalism. Yes, we'd have been together in a peasant life. We'd have found each other regardless. Doomed to eternity.

"I woke one day and you were by my side, looking like a fresh starch sheet of sand. And I thought to myself, running my fingers from your nose to your lips to your neck, what had I contributed to the world apart from a few meek attempts at comedy? Had I helped anyone at all? Was it just a facade? I was aware of my stomach, a thick tangible growl in the room. I walked across the hall. Made us both pancakes. You thanked me. I felt I was a spectator of my own life, surrounded by red felt and cup holders, the projection a soft whirring blur of ambiguity. My soul unreeling with the tape slowly, slowly as the images languidly dripped onto the screen, as the people around me began to drum their fingers, look around, pull out their phones, browse Tumblr, Twitter, whatever. In the demure blue glow that began to swim around me, I swore I saw my own face a few times. The length of the film was indeterminable, but as the toilet breaks grew more frequent, the insistent tapping louder, I knew it would be cut off soon. It was a tumbling, capsizing feeling when I realized that to most people, I was simply a pixelated number. And what had I contributed? Had I contributed anything to myself, was I in any way evolved from what I was 6 years ago? Do I have the right to refer to my state as 'growing' when I've been producing the same bullshit for that same time span? It was another morning, and I kissed you, and I walked to the living room and looked out to the birds, to the people sitting in their buildings, the grass lying at the bottom of our apartment block and they all had set out tasks, they all had reasons to exist for this day, and I felt like I was nothing in comparison. Despite my wealthy status, despite the fact that I could buy them all.

"One day I was flipping through a book in your collection, the title I do not recall, and as my thumb moved across it in rapid flight, I noticed at the end were several blank pages, thick, coarse, hitting each other in collective empathy. The thought hit me madly, and it made my heart stammer, my pulse burst, to think of filling those blank pages with my own prose, to deface proper, published literature with my own sordid thoughts. For you to find, maybe keep one day. But that book was yours, and with that I felt my fingers weigh down with dirt and insects, some real, some fictitious. I could no longer hold it, much less dent it with my pencil. So I left it and went to wish you good morning.

"Later, I planned to write you a proper note, spare you from my symbolic tripe. So there I sat. I mulled over the words in an unremitting blaze, everything I conjured up too flowery, too purple, too reminiscent of the modernists and the Victorians. To talk of serious matters poetically, especially matters concerning yourself is a severe anomaly. So I looked to my hands and tried to see hands, and I looked to my reflection and tried to see person. But undoubtedly, my hands were the withered pulped meat of someone beyond me, beaten by centuries of despair, the weight of all the tissues it ever held pressing deep into me, a salty dampness at the back of my throat. And my inky parallel in the computer was not so much a person as it was a thing on the cusp of death. Even if I had dropped my pen and ran back into your arms, simpering smile and all, the Grim Reaper would have still followed my ghost and demanded repayment for the deed I promised him. Sat at that writing desk, a webcam my only witness, I felt London underneath me."

During this soliloquy, this vain attempt at poetry waxing, an apartment adjacent to them begins to rattle. The one that turns Phil's veins to ice whenever he passes it. Either his mind has truly turned to shit or the jeers and clanging from the room are real. The paper walls rotting and sagging under the ghoulish weight upon them. He thought, had Dan gone to join them, find pleasure in their company, tell them anecdotes about the time they spent when he was alive? And if so, who was this above him? This pink collection of air? This flesh strung together from the frail needle of his imagination? The unwinding ribbon of time, existence in itself, covers them both. Phil lunges for it, tries to place it around his neck. He can't. He lays with his arms useless around his head. Looking into Dan's eyes, he sought the likeness of somebody whom he could not find.

"Isn't amazing how seamlessly wound our organs are? Such an intricate design, all in the perfect place for us to function. That morning I breathed in, chewed my breakfast, felt it land in my stomach, shat it out a few hours later. God is an artist, don't forget that. They're a painter. Look outside, to the dancing crows, the emblematic moon, silver swishing into purple behind the blooming flutter of black. Look to your own fingers." They were cramping in the slowly shrinking room.

"I slumped into myself those following months, gliding aimlessly through all our subsequent videos. But isn't that life though? An empty skate rink, with the ice melting under the heat of the lights. Under the heat of your skin. Fucking felt like oiling a frying pan up sometimes. Functioning felt like programming a robot sometimes. Everything was everything ever, and I couldn't cope. I'd considered it all, Phillip! What would be most striking? The syringe as a phallic symbol? Homemade intravenous therapy? The blade, a tiny thimble, a short sweet flight off a canopy? I was stirring with ideas, a whirlwind of creativity, sometimes I thought that that would be the thing to kill me."

Phil turns his face as he fights the onslaught of mental souvenirs, trinkets and knick-knacks of his suffering. The unexplored depths of his eyes, the last time he'd seen... the blaze of cars from the mulberry night. "I'm going for a wash." "Okay." The ruby droplets of sunset fading from the horizon. Oncoming swamp of night. The bathroom, metal, metal, the clunk of metal. The smash of metal on their tiled floor.

"Stop," he chokes. Dan doesn't abide. He never does. If he did, he'd still be...

"You drew the silk of my body to a gentle pause. Down the stream of the vein in my neck as I sat in a defoliated, insubordinate stupor. You are the ground I amble upon, passive, omnipresent, happy to be there. You are the gravity that weighs my flesh down, cascading conflagration down the forest of my body. Without you, there is no me. Without you, I sit alone contemplating death endlessly. Cold water to the face. A pale canvas for me to spit on. The harsh breeze that rips the bark from the tree.

"My body is floriferous. Harvest me. Split and stratify my blood cells. I was gone, but I'm here now."

It was impossible to cancel out now, the nostalgia-like swoon that took over Phil's bones. The ricocheting clunk of metal, the swoosh of the bullet echoing through every chamber. Crimson goo spilled carelessly over the bathroom tiles. Arms splayed over the tub in one final, grand gesture. He was even extravagant in death. Vacant eyes, somehow registering his shocked presence, the jaw unwound, the trickle in his veins pausing to a still. Phil's eyes ring tightly shut. Every agonizing flick of his wrist chides him, going in 2:1 speed with the slicing tick of the clock. Like two musicians harmonizing. Like a concerto preparing itself for the grand finale.

He opens his eyelids again, exposes himself once more. For the last time, he swears. Dan is still here. Sat at the end of the bed. He smiles down at him, the thrum of his pseudo-words trailing out of the door, in the shallow breeze of night. And with them, so did he. The flamboyant flick of a phantom tail the only thing left in his wake. A sound from the thinness of their corridor palpitates into his room though, one final gift, a piercing echo from his imagination.

"Bye, Phil."

He comes.


End file.
